The laundry hook-ups in our house are located in the basement, in the same room as the utilities. When we first toured our house, I could have sworn there was a slightly recessed region in that room for the washer and dryer. I was wrong. Here’s a shot looking through the door:

and from inside the room:

Yeah, way tinier than I remembered. I mean, sure, we’re only in there when we need clean clothes, but it’s so tight and cramped and I want to change that. Unfortunately, there’s a bathroom on the other side of that wall by the washer/dryer and it’s not worth the effort to move it. But I do want to find a better layout for this room. Here’s how it’s currently set up (some of those numbers are pretty tiny so click on the picture to embiggen):

The washer/dryer are on post-it notes so I can move them around (yes, the dryer really is angled- I’m convinced that if the dryer is too close to the sump pump that a sock will fall in and get eaten. Yup. Irrational fears ftw…), but the rest of the utilities are pretty stationary. If the sump pump was in the corner and not sticking out into the middle of the room, I’d have options, but moving the sump pump? …yeah… probably not happening…

Got any ideas? Right now, I’m working on some cosmetic issues- mostly filling in divots and gouges on that drywalled wall so I can prime and paint over the wonderful graffiti left by the previous owners:

The whole wall is full of stuff like that- it’s like they just sketched things out on the walls and when they didn’t like it, they just scribbled it out. There are also numerous holes left by things they put up and then relocated (there’s a repeating pattern of 3 holes across a good portion of the wall), and from things they cut, but mis-measured:

I’ve got my hands full patching and taping and mudding that wall, but I’d like to go into this with some sort of plan. Any ideas on how I can make this room less cramped? Laundry hook-ups are on that drywalled wall (the one with the door) so I can’t move the washer/dryer too much, but there has to be a better layout out there. Any thoughts?

2 Responses to Laundry Layout and Questionable Utility Placement…

I thought about it when we were first looking to buy a washer/dryer, but I really don’t like the combo units (like the one we had in our apartment back home) and the only stackable washers and dryers I’ve been able to find are front loaders, which I refuse to use. So unless we can figure out a way to stack ours and be able to use them without a ladder (I’m thinking about those dryer knobs that would end up near the ceiling), I think condensing them into one unit isn’t feasible. :(